What a pretty pass we have come to, when I cannot summon up from the depths of my ostensibly Christian soul even a modicum of sympathy for a man who faces a 5-8 times higher rate ratio of hospitalization than someone in their 20s if he actually contracts this disease.
What a failure on my part, when I cannot face the site of the marching maw of death and weep for the souls of those who stand in peril of its path.
What a fucking piece of work I am, that all I can do in this moment is get drunk and alliterate.
What are we to do, really, in these times?
We had a meeting up at the commune where my parents live. It….was a shitshow. One family obviously wanted to appropriate — there is no other word for it — the home of another family, and the rest of us were appalled. And the first family lost their collective shit when they (a) were called out on the fact that they had clearly planned all of this in advance, and (b) lost the vote. At which point the rest of us did what we all do best in such situations, namely cook fabulous meals, drink copious amounts of wine, and discuss politely what it means, precisely, when one can’t quite discern the edge of shadows in the broad light of day because the air quality is so poor.
I thought about titling this piece “1000 walnuts,” because that’s what we did, my eldest son and I, once it became clear that the licensed therapist had no fucking idea how disgusting it was to watch her enable the sexist, colonialist, gentrifying assholery of her son. Once it became clear that even when the younger daughter of the lesbian couple was literally weeping at the assault of the nordic asshole and his shabby gentile father that no help was forthcoming from anyone except yours truly, all we could was pick up walnuts.
Have you ever tried to sleep in a tin-roofed house under a walnut tree in the fall? It is a wonder to behear. The intermittent gunfire of Mexican cartels and latter-day Hokan tribes is nothing compared to the battering of useless fruit on the roof of a century-old log cabin.
I tried to google uses for black walnuts. I failed. Thus, what I paid my 6 year old to do was, quite literally, to pick up — at a penny per — walnuts for loading on to a burn pile. And this was useful about as much as what we were encouraging my 4 year old to do, namely cut the shit out of that vinca.
1000 walnuts indeed. We did pick up something close to that. It is a large tree, after all.
Pimpgnosis 